1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus for recognizing and processing information of electronic parts, and more particularly, to an apparatus for recognizing and processing information of electronic parts capable of obtaining and storing part information thereof.
2. Description of the Related Art
Typically, an electronic device which operates under externally received power includes a printed circuit board having electronic parts installed thereon. The electronic parts may include components such as semiconductor chips. Each of the components may include an electronic circuit for performing a predetermined electronic function.
The semiconductor chips may be manufactured by sequentially or selectively performing a plurality of semiconductor manufacturing processes such as diffusion, deposition, exposure, cleansing, and etching on a semiconductor wafer. The semiconductor chips manufactured as described above may be mounted on the printed circuit board of the electronic device through a packaging apparatus such as an electronic part mounter. The electronic part mounter (e.g., a surface mounter, component mounter, or chip mounter) may function to mount an electronic part such as a semiconductor chip or resistor on a desired position of the printed circuit board.
A conventional chip mounter may include a main body on which a circuit board is moved to a desired location, a chip supply unit mounted on the main body, a head unit disposed at the main body and sequentially using vacuum suction to grasp electronic parts supplied from the chip supply unit and moving the electronic parts to arbitrary desired positions on the circuit board for mounting, and a controller for inputting and storing information of the supplied electronic parts and controlling operation of the head unit.
The chip supply unit typically includes a feeder and a reel mounted on the feeder. The reel typically has a certain length of electronic part supply tape wound thereon. In addition, electronic parts such as semiconductor chips are typically aligned and loaded on the electronic part supply tape at predetermined intervals.
The head unit typically includes a nozzle for using vacuum suction to grasp the electronic parts loaded on the electronic part supply tape and an X-Y moving body for moving the nozzle to a desired position on the circuit board.
Information of the electronic parts loaded on the feeder and supplied into the main body of the conventional chip mounter is typically input into the controller. The reason the conventional chip mounter's controller typically inputs and stores information of the electronic parts is that the controller typically must precisely recognize a positional relationship between a moving position of the X-Y moving body and a mounting position of the electronic parts on the circuit board.
Conventionally, in order to input the information of the electronic parts, a man-machine interface (MMI) in which an operator directly inputs the information into the chip mounter has been used. Therefore, in the MMI, the operator typically inputs the information of the electronic parts on the basis of listed specifications of the electronic parts such as the sizes, lead numbers, pitches, thicknesses, and so on. However, when the specification is not available or not provided from a manufacturer of the electronic parts, the operator may need to measure the sizes, lead numbers, pitches, thicknesses, etc., of the electronic parts visually or using measurement devices such as vernier calipers, etc., and manually input them into the controller.
As a result, due to the difficulty to precisely input and store the information of the electronic parts, the input information may need to be repeatedly corrected so that the chip mounter can precisely mount the electronic parts on arbitrary desired positions of the circuit board.